Complex projects, such as new product development, require coordination of many organizations and activities to complete the project and to ensure consistent, predictable project execution to obtain high quality the first time the project is executed. To a large extent, product development remains a low yield process because the entire process remains undocumented in most industries. Also, there is currently no existing general framework that allows documentation of both project management and first-time process quality. Incomplete communication among and between project activities may lead to backtracking throughout the process, wasting time and resources. Product development, in particular, often encounters a great deal of reworking and scrapped materials because currently known product development processes are design tool-focused rather than process-focused. In other words, currently known processes simply assign separate responsibilities to different people without showing them how the responsibilities flow together in any cohesive way. The activities in the overall project end up being treated as independent activities with no real formal links among them. The resulting disconnects between the different people involved in the product development process results in a great deal of wasteful rework and scrap when users attempt to mesh their different activities together.
In addition, work flow mapping usually relies on existing organizational structures. As organizational structures evolve, existing work flows become obsolete. Thus, there is a need to document work flows that are independent of organization structures and are instead aligned with standard disciplines and/or functions.
Further, insufficient communication may make it difficult to determine dependencies between activities. For example, one activity may require information from several other activities before proceeding, but due to lack of coordination the information may not be available at the time the activity needs it. Also, a person in one activity may not even know what activities provide needed information or who to contact for that information. As a result, the lack of a detailed, cohesive work flow may slow down product development. This necessitates data exchange templates that capture details of the exact information exchange across activities in work flows.
Moreover, incomplete information within the work management system may create inconsistencies and unpredictability in work results even if communication is adequate. For example, separation of the engineering and manufacturing stages also makes it difficult to ensure that a given design is producible until after the design stage is substantially complete. Also, currently available work flow maps only indicate the activities to be executed, without any details with respect to the actual execution steps (e.g., work instructions, version control of tools, design criteria, preferred/best practices, etc.). This lack of detail leaves open the possibility of differing interpretations and/or execution of a given activity, makes it difficult to ensure predictability and consistency in the work results. While it is possible to conduct quality control during a design and/or product review, these reviews are often conducted after the design and/or product are well on their way to completion. Thus, correction of any errors requires extensive backtracking, further wasting resources. Ideally, product development incorporates in-process quality control in addition to stage-gate product review based quality control, but there is currently no known mechanism for in-process quality control.
Currently known workflow maps are drafted as images without any interactive capabilities. Thus, even though the workflow maps may provide a graphical representation of the work to be done, the actual work instructions and documentation for a given project are still conducted independently of the workflow map itself. In other words, there is no way to integrate the workflow maps with other maps, instructions, and documentation into a unified work management system.
There is a desire for an interactive system that can improve workflow in a complex process by improving communication and coordination of activities within the process while at the same time providing details on how to execute the activities with templates on work instructions, tools and methods, design criteria, and design standards.